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Je vais déménager à Manhattan au mois d'Août. Je garde un pied-à-terre à Vancouver et reviens fréquemment à Montréal.
Je viens de voir cette nouvelle toute fraiche. Je vais habiter tout juste à côté de Washington Square, et ce nouveau développement m'intéresse au plus haut point. J'esssaierai de vous en faire part régulièrement.
Voici l'article du Wall Street Journal:
First Look at NYU Tower Plan
University Wants 38-Story Building on Village Site; Critics Fret Over Pei Design
By CRAIG KARMIN
New York University on Thursday expects to unveil its much-anticipated design plans for the proposed 38-story tower in Greenwich Village, one of the most ambitious projects in the school's controversial 25-year expansion plan.
Before and after: The space between two towers designed by I.M. Pei, above, would be filled by a new tower, in rendering below, under NYU's plan.
The tower, sight-unseen, is already facing backlash from community groups who say the building would interfere with the original three-tower design by famed architect I.M. Pei. Critics also say the new building would flood the neighborhood with more construction and cause other disruptions.
The concrete fourth tower with floor-to-ceiling glass windows would be built on the Bleecker Street side of the site, known as University Village. It would house a moderate-priced hotel on the bottom 15 floors. The 240-room hotel would be intended for visiting professors and other NYU guests, but would also be available to the public. The top floors would be housing for school faculty.
In addition, NYU would move the Jerome S. Coles Sports Center farther east toward Mercer Street to clear space for a broader walkway through the site that connects Bleecker and Houston streets. The sports complex would be torn down and rebuilt with a new design.
Grimshaw Architects
The plan also calls for replacing a grocery store that is currently in the northwest corner of the site with a playground. As a result, the site would gain 8,000 square feet of public space under the tower proposal, according to an NYU spokesman.
NYU considers the new tower a crucial component of its ambitious expansion plans to add six million square feet to the campus by 2031—including proposed sites in Brooklyn, Governors Island and possibly the World Trade Center site—in an effort to increase its current student population of about 40,000 by 5,500.
The tower is also one of the most contentious parts of the plan because the University Village site received landmark status in 2008 and is home to a Pablo Picasso statue. The three existing towers, including one dedicated to affordable public housing, were designed by Mr. Pei in the 1960s. The 30-story cast-concrete structures are considered a classic example of modernism.
Grimshaw Architects, the New York firm that designed the proposed tower, says it wants the new structure to complement Mr. Pei's work. "It would be built with a sensitivity to the existing buildings," says Mark Husser, a Grimshaw partner. "It is meant to relate to the towers but also be contemporary."
Grimshaw Architects
NYU says the planned building, at center of rendering above, would relate to current towers.
He said the new tower would use similar materials to the Pei structures and would be positioned at the site in a way not to cut off views from the existing buildings.
Little of this news is likely to pacify local opposition. "A fourth tower would utterly change Pei's design," says Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. He says that Mr. Pei designed a number of plans about the same time that similarly featured three towers around open space, such as the Society Hill Towers in Philadelphia.
Watch a video showing a rendering of New York University's proposed 38-story tower, one of the most ambitious projects in the university's vast 2031 expansion plan. The tower would be located near Bleecker Street in Manhattan. Video courtesy of Grimshaw Architects.
Residents say they fear that the new tower would bring years of construction and reduce green spaces and trees. "We are oversaturated with NYU buildings," says Sylvia Rackow, who lives in the tower for public housing. "They have a lot of other options, like in the financial district, but they are just greedy."
NYU will have to win permission from the city's Landmark Commission before it can proceed. This process begins on Monday when NYU makes a preliminary presentation to the local community board.
Jason Andrew for the Wall Street Journal
NYU is 'just greedy,' says Sylvia Rackow, seen in her apartment. Grimshaw.
While the commission typically designates a particular district or building, University Village is unusual in that it granted landmark status to a site and the surrounding landscaping, making it harder to predict how the commission may respond.
NYU also would need to get commercial zoning approval to build a hotel in an area designated as residential. And the university would have to get approval to purchase small strips of land on the site from the city.
If the university is tripped up in getting required approvals, it has a backup plan to build a tower on the site currently occupied by a grocery store at Bleecker and LaGuardia, which would have a size similar to the proposed tower of 270,000 square feet.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704198004575311161334409470.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsForth

Developers & Chains
ABOUT US
Developers & Chains deals in business opportunities, not opportunities that you've missed out on. We specialize in futures, not histories.
Developers & Chains is a subscription-only publication that focuses on retail and restaurant expansion across Canada.
Developers & Chains is a subscription-only publication that concentrates on the growth and expansion aspects of the retail and restaurant industry across Canada, from British Columbia to Newfoundland.
Each issue, and there are over 100 each year, includes information on new concepts and existing chains that have stated an interest in expansion and/or are showing signs of growth. And the reports include details on the companies, their needs and requirement along with the appropriate contacts.
Developers & Chains issues also identify new shopping projects, malls and centres that are renovating, expanding or that simply have prime spaces that our subscribers may have available. Again, the issues include the leasing contacts, the uses they are seeking and where to contact them.
There is more too. The publication keeps the subscribers aware of planned industry events and changes within the business. There are frequent reports on both retail and development sales and acquisitions, what companies are retaining which real estate-related suppliers and much, much more.
Developers & Chains provides the type of leads and information that everyone in the business needs to make calculated decisions and it is all presented in a clear, factual, concise and timely manner that you can depend on.
More important though, much of the leasing leads and company details are exclusive to the Developers & Chains’ E-News. They are available only in this publication. The information is exclusive in that it comes directly from our personal conversations with the principals or representatives of the featured companies. It’s almost as if you are there, sitting in on the conversation.
Take a look through a recent issues of the Developers & Chains’ E-News. You will find details on new concepts seeking their first location and national chains looking for dozens of new units. You will learn, first hand, about planned entries into new markets. Whether it is a 150 square foot kiosk or a 30,000 square foot anchor tenant for your property, this is where you will meet them first. You will read about malls, centres and large format projects that have that ideal space, perfect for your next store. And you will ‘meet’ the people and companies involved.
Oh yes, and the ‘editorial’ that ends every issue. Don’t take offence. It is just a tongue-in-cheek, maybe even irreverent, look at the business that we sometimes take a little too seriously.
Sent from my SM-T330NU using Tapatalk

Dans le SFGate
Montreal's quartet of cultures creates a colorful pattern
Margo Pfeiff
Updated 11:25 am, Friday, July 4, 2014
Tourists gather near the Basilique Notre-Dame in Montreal. Photo: Joanne Levesque, Getty Images
The Ogilvy Piper makes his way through the jewelry section of the iconic department store at noon every day. Photo: Margo Pfeiff, Special To The Chronicle
A room at Old Montreal's classic 18th century Hotel Pierre du Calvet. Photo: Margo Pfeiff, Special To The Chronicle
Old Montreal's classic 18th century Hotel Pierre du Calvet. A terrace at an Old Montreal restaurant. Photo: Margo Pfeiff, Special To The Chronicle
Activities at the Lachine Canal National Historic Site. Photo: Margo Pfeiff, Special To The Chronicle
Ninety percent of all first encounters in downtown Montreal begin with the same two words. That are the same word.
"Bonjour. Hi."
Respond one way and you parlez français; answer the other and you're in English territory. Despite periodic bickering - including threats of Quebec's separating from the rest of Canada - the biggest French-speaking city outside of Paris has actually become increasingly bilingual and harmonious over recent decades.
But with the strong bilateral English-French vibe, what's often overshadowed is that there were four founding cultures that laid down strong roots on this island in the middle of the St. Lawrence River almost 350 years ago.
I'm reminded of this as I wait at a traffic light staring at each culture's national symbols on a flapping city flag - the French fleur-de-lis, the red English rose, an Irish shamrock and Scotland's thistle. Though Montreal is wildly multicultural today, in the 19th century, 98 percent of the city's population was French, English, Irish or Scottish.
Is it still possible, I wonder, to experience each of those distinct original cultures - including real, non-poutine France and genuine tally-ho England - in modern Montreal?
Heart of New France
Since I believe every cultural quest is improved with a signature cocktail, I start with France and I order my very first absinthe at the Sarah B Bar, named after Sarah Bernhardt, queen of French tragedy.
As couples cuddle in "Green Fairy" alcoves, my bartender pours the notorious chartreuse liquor that Hemingway, Toulouse-Lautrec and Oscar Wilde imbibed in their Parisian days into a specially shaped glass. He rests a flat, perforated "absinthe spoon" topped with a sugar cube across the top, then drips ice water until it is melted, turning the absinthe milky.
Legend has it that absinthe has driven men to madness and drove Van Gogh to slice off his ear. Sipping the herbal, floral and slightly bitter cocktail, I look closely at the bottle's label - while the current version is a hefty 160 proof, it's missing the likely source of "la fée verte" (green fairy) hallucinations, wormwood.
I teeter on uneven cobblestone streets to the heart of New France in Old Montreal amid clip-clopping horse-drawn carriages. Bells chime from Notre Dame Basilica with its Limoges stained glass windows from France, artists sell their crafts in narrow alleyways, and in the evening, gas lamps still light up rue Ste.-Helene.
I check into La Maison Pierre du Calvet, a nine-room guesthouse spanning three small buildings dating back to 1725. It's a stone-walled time capsule with random staircases, crooked hallways and an antique-filled library with ancient fireplaces. Escargot and stag fillet are served in a grand old dining room, and the chateau luxury includes a grand step-up, monarchy-caliber canopied bed.
The morning streets waft cafe au lait and croissant aromas as I walk to the walled city's original market square of Place Royale to Maison Christian Faure, a chic new French pastry shop. In the hands-on cooking school, I glean the secrets behind crisp-on-the-outside, chewy-on-the-inside, iconic French macarons.
It's so simple they even offer kids' classes, and it's made all the more fun by Lyon-born Faure himself, a Meilleur Ouvrier de France (MOF) - an elite group of France's best chefs - and the stories of his days as pastry chef for French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the prince of Monaco.
"I moved here because the public markets are like those in Provence," he croons in a Lyon accent, "and because Montreal is so, mmmmm ... Europe."
The pipes are calling
While French zealots came to the New World to save the souls of "sauvages," the Scots came to make money. And you can still see plenty of it in the Golden Square Mile's historical buildings sloping up from Sherbrooke Street, downtown's main upscale shopping boulevard, to Mont Royal, the park-topped hill after which the city is named.
The area was a residential tycoon alley from 1850 to 1930, occupied by rail, shipping, sugar and beer barons with names like Angus, McIntyre and Molson who owned 70 percent of the country's wealth. About 85 percent of the lavish estates were lost before heritage finally won over demolition in 1973.
When I walk those hilly streets for the first time instead of whizzing by in my car, I'm surprised to see downtown with different eyes, an obviously British and Scottish quarter with an eclectic architectural mix from Neo-Gothic and Queen Anne to Art Nouveau, estates with names such as Ravenscrag and castles crafted from imported Scottish red sandstone.
These days they're consulates, office headquarters and the Canadian McCord Museum; 30 of the beauties are campus outposts bought by McGill University, a legacy of Scottish merchant James McGill, who donated his 47-acre summer estate to become one of Canada's leading universities.
One of my favorite buildings is the 1893 Royal "Vic" (Victoria) Hospital, where you can get your appendix yanked in a Scottish baronial castle complete with turrets.
And where there are Scots, there are bagpipes. Montreal's most famous piper is at Ogilvy, a high-end department store on Ste. Catherine Street. Every day from noon to 1 p.m. since 1927, a kilt-clad piper plays marches and reels as he strolls around all five floors, down spiral staircases and beneath massive chandeliers where purchases are packed in tartan bags and boxes
I also hear the whining tones of "Scotland the Brave" as I head toward my Highland cocktail at the Omni Hotel, where a kilted piper every Wednesday evening reminds folks emerging from Sherbrooke Street office towers that it's Whisky Folies night, a single-malt-scotch tasting in the Alice Bar.
I choose five from the 10- to 20-year-olds served with a cuppa fish and chips. A local Scotsman drops in for a wee one, informing me that there's been a benefit St. Andrews Ball in Montreal every November for 177 years, "but come to the Highland Games, where there's dancing, throwing stuff around and looking up kilts - fun for the whole family."
Montreal's bit o' Irish
Snippets of the four founding cultures pop up repeatedly when you walk around town - statues of Robbie Burns and Sir John A. Macdonald, the Glasgow-born first prime minister of Canada; the green Art Nouveau ironwork of a Paris Metro at the Victoria Square subway station, given by France; British hero Adm. Horatio Nelson overlooking Old Montreal's main square (though the original likeness was blown to bits by Irish republican extremists in 1966).
Ah, the Irish. They arrived in Montreal in big numbers in the early 1800s to build the Lachine Canal to bypass rapids blocking the shipping route to the Great Lakes. They settled nearby in Griffintown, currently a maze of condos and cranes.
Stroll along rapidly gentrifying Notre Dame Street, still an eclectic melange of antiques-and-collectibles shops, funky cafes and local bistros.
The Irish were unique among English-speaking immigrants - hatred for their English oppressors back home had them cozying up with the French, fellow Catholics. Surprisingly, the Irish legacy is dominant in Montreal; about 40 percent of the population has a wee bit of Blarney blood.
Of course there are also pubs and churches, St. Pat's Basilica being the ornate religious hub, its interior adorned with intertwined fleurs-de-lis and shamrocks.
Conveniently nearby, sacred brew is served over the altar of Hurley's Pub, a favorite hangout where Irish and Newfoundlanders work magic with fiddles, pipes and drums - even the Pogues have jammed here.
I love Hurley's because it's a rare pub with Guinness stout on tap both icy cold and traditionally lukewarm; I prefer the latter for bigger flavor.
"Watch him top that brew up three times," Frankie McKeown urges from a neighboring stool. "Even in Ireland they hardly do that now."
The Irish come out of the woodwork on March 17, when Canada's oldest St. Patrick's parade turns downtown green, as it has since 1824.
"It's amazing," says McKeown. "In Dublin it's all done in 45 minutes, but here we're watching floats for three hours." A grand party ensues afterward at Hurley's. "But it's just as much fun on Robbie Burns Day, when a haggis held high follows a piper through the pub."
Britain in the mix
Britain enters Montreal's picture after the Seven Years War in the 1760s when France dumps Quebec in exchange for the sugar colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe. By 1845, about 55,000 British top out as 57 percent of Montreal's population - and the percentage has been dwindling ever since.
While there may not be much Scottish brogue or Irish lilt left these days, there's plenty of culture on the plate and in the glass, though surprisingly not so much representing British roots in Montreal.
In 2012, English chef Jamie Oliver made big waves by teaming up with Montreal chef Derek Dammann to highlight creative British tavern-inspired fare at the popular Maison Publique (Public House), serving locally sourced, home-smoked/pickled and cured angles on Welsh rarebit, hogget with oats and cabbage, and the like.
Otherwise, the truest of Montreal's British establishments is the Burgundy Lion in Griffintown, one of the few places to offer Sunday British "footie" on the big screens, as kippers 'n' eggs, Lancashire pot pie and cucumber sandwiches are dished out by gals in tight, mod-'70s outfits.
I happen to drop in during England's National Day, St. George's, to find the place hopping with dart-throwing, papier-mache piñata-style "dragon slaying" and ballad singing. I wind up at the bar sipping my pint of Boddingtons between two fellows, both dressed in fake chain mail. The one also draped in a Union Jack British flag clicks my glass with his bottle, announcing "Here's to Blighty!" before raising the visor on his medieval knight helmet to take a royal slug.
Can you still experience Montreal's four founding nations in this multicultural modern city?
Oui. Yes. And aye.
If You Go
GETTING THERE
Air Canada offers daily flights from San Francisco to Montreal year round. (888) 247-2262, www.aircanada.com.
WHERE TO STAY
La Maison Pierre du Calvet: 405 Bonsecours St., Old Montreal. (514) 282-1725 or (866) 544-1725. www.pierreducalvet.ca/english. Lavish French colonial inn. From $265 double with continental breakfast. (Two on-site dining rooms serve French fare.)
Fairmont Queen Elizabeth: 900 Rene Levesque Blvd. West. (866) 540-4483. www.fairmont.com/queen-elizabeth-montreal. A classic fit for everyone from the Queen Mother to John and Yoko; where they recorded "Give Peace a Chance" in 1969. From $209 double.
Hotel Nelligan: 106 St. Paul West, Old Montreal. (877) 788-2040. www.hotelnelligan.com. Chic boutique hotel named after a famed Irish-French poet. From $250 double.
WHERE TO EAT
Le Mas des Oliviers: 1216 Bishop St. (514) 861-6733. www.lemasdesoliviers.ca. Classic French cuisine at a landmark downtown restaurant, one of the city's oldest places to eat. Dinner for two from $120. Also open for lunch.
Restaurant L'Express: 3927 St. Denis. (514) 845-5333, www.restaurantlexpress.ca. Popular, casual French bistro, a Montreal icon. Dinner for two from $60.
Maison Publique: 4720 Rue Marquette. (514) 507-0555, www.maisonpublique.com. Jamie Oliver's hip, up-market and creative take on British tavern fare. Very popular, no reservations. Dinner for two from $60.
Burgundy Lion: 2496 Notre-Dame West. (514) 934-0888, www.burgundylion.com. Only true British pub in Montreal. Large selection of local and imported brews and one of Canada's biggest single-malt whiskey collections. English gastro pub menu with lunch and dinner from $40 for two.
Hurley's Irish Pub: 1225 Crescent St. (514) 861-4111, www.hurleysirishpub.com. Great selection of brews, a traditional Emerald Isle pub menu, and Irish and/or Newfoundland fiddle music nightly. Entrees from $10.
WHAT TO DO
Point-a-Calliere Museum of Archaeology and History: 350 Place Royale, Old Montreal. (514) 872-7858, www.pacmusee.qc.ca/en/home. Excellent museum set atop the original city town square. Closed Mondays except in summer. Adults $18.
McCord Museum: 690 Rue Sherbrooke West. (514) 398-7100, www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en. Extensive cultural museum of all things Canadian. Frequent exhibitions of Montreal's various cultures. Closed Mondays. Adults $12.
Fitz and Follwell Co: 115 Ave. du Mont-Royal West. (514) 840-0739, www.fitzandfollwell.co. Guided Montreal biking, walking and unique snow tours.
Martin Robitaille: Private history-oriented city guide. [email protected]
Maison Christian Faure: 355 Place Royale, Old Montreal, (514) 508-6453, www.christianfaure.ca. Hands-on French pastry and macaron-making classes. There's even a pastry-making boot camp for kids.
Whisky Folies, Omni Hotel: 1050 Sherbrooke West. (514) 985-9315, http://bit.ly/1iCaJxc . Single-malt scotch and whisky tastings with fish and chips every Wednesday, 5-9 p.m.. From $16 to $40.
My Bicyclette: 2985-C St. Patrick (Atwater Market). (877) 815-0150, www.mybicyclette.ca. Bike rental and tours of the Lachine Canal region.
MORE INFORMATION
Tourism Montréal: www.tourisme-montreal.org.
Tourism Québec: www.bonjourquebec.com.
Margo Pfeiff is a freelance writer living in Montreal. E-mail: [email protected]

Bay Street still has Canada’s most expensive office space
http://renx.ca/bay-street-still-canadas-expensive-office-space/
Bay Street in Toronto has the most expensive office space in Canada, and no other city comes close to matching the $68.52 per square foot average rent that’s being asked for in the heart of the country’s financial district.
JLL Canada recently released its “Most Expensive Streets for Office Space” report, which ranks Canadian cities by their highest asking rents. It shows many companies are still willing to pay a premium for the most expensive spaces, and competition is growing to get into prominent financial, retail and government hubs.
“The most significant trend that we are seeing across major markets is that there are a large number of new developments underway,” said JLL Canada president Brett Miller. “Although we have only seen minor changes to the top market rents thus far in 2014, we anticipate that as the new inventory comes to market, overall rents will decrease in the older class-A stock whilst headline rents in new developments may raise the top line rents.”
Here are the most expensive streets in nine major Canadian cities
1. Bay Street, Toronto, $68.52 per square foot
Bay Street held strong in first place for the fourth year running. It features the headquarters of major Canadian banks and is home to many investment banks, accounting and law firms. Brookfield Place, at 161 Bay St., continues to command the highest office rents of any building in Canada at $76.54 per square foot. The average market rent in Toronto is $34.82 per square foot. (Bay St. looking north from Front St. shown in the image,)
2. 8th Avenue SW, Calgary, $59.06 per square foot
8th Avenue SW again has the highest average gross office rents in Calgary. Large vacancies and availabilities along this corridor typically account for significant activity and command market-leading rates. Large oil and gas companies have historically clustered around the central business district in this area. The top rent on the street is $64.40 per square foot and the average market rent in Calgary is $46 per square foot.
3. Burrard Street, Vancouver, $58.87 per square foot
Burrard Street has dropped to third place despite a slight increase in average asking rent from $58.47 in 2013. Approximately 18.3 per cent of downtown class-A office supply is located on Burrard Street between West Georgia Street and Canada Place.
The vacancy rate in these six buildings sits at 1.6 per cent, which justifies this location commanding some of the highest rental rates in the city despite the impending influx of new supply that’s putting downward pressure on rents throughout the central business district.
The top rent on the street is $66.06 per square foot and the average market rent in Vancouver is $38.81 per square foot.
4. Albert Street, Ottawa, $52.10 per square foot
Albert Street remained in fourth position with average rents decreasing slightly from $53.40 per square foot. Albert Street is mainly home to government-related office towers, including numerous foreign embassies, and a few of the largest Canadian business law firms.
There seems to be a wait-and-see approach in anticipation of the 2015 federal election regarding the government’s intentions to lease or return more space to the market. The top rent on the street is $53.54 per square foot and the average market rent in Ottawa is $30.90 per square foot.
5. 101st Street NW, Edmonton, $46.71 per square foot
The average asking rent dropped from $48.19 per square foot, but 101st Street NW is expected to remain the most expensive in Edmonton with the recent commitment to build the arena district, a large-scale, mixed-use project incorporating the city’s new National Hockey League arena. This is expected to revitalize some of the most important corners on the street. The top rent on the street is $54.15 per square foot and the average market rent in Edmonton is $28.30 per square foot.
6. René-Lévesque W, Montreal, $44.28 per square foot
The average gross rent on the street hasn’t changed significantly year over year, but the total value of tenant inducement packages has nearly doubled. The most expensive building on the street (1250 René-Lévesque W) rents for $52.76 per square foot but has seen some downward pressure of two to four dollars on its net rent due to 170,000 square feet of vacant space left behind by Heenan Blaikie. The average market rent in Montreal is $30.38 per square foot.
7. Upper Water Street, Halifax, $36.42 per square foot
Upper Water Street has maintained seventh place despite its average asking rent dropping from $36.65 per square foot last year. New construction coming on stream is expected to put downward pressure on rents in existing office buildings. The top rent on the street is $36.62 per square foot and the average market rent in Halifax is $27.44 per square foot.
8. Portage Avenue, Winnipeg, $35.67 per square foot
Portage Avenue held strong in eighth place, with its average rent increasing from $35.17 per square foot. The class-A market remains tight and is expected to remain so through 2015. The top rent on the street is $37.32 per square foot and the average market rent in Winnipeg is $23.62 per square foot.
9. Laurier Boulevard, Québec City, $27.50 per square foot
Laurier Boulevard held its ninth-place position despite the average rent dropping from $28.14 per square foot. There’s been no notable increase in the average gross rent and the vacancy rate on the street remains low at 5.2 per cent compared to the rest of the market’s 7.8 per cent. The top rent on the street is $28.98 per square foot and the average market rent in Québec City is $21.89 per square foot.
JLL manages more than 50 million square feet of facilities across Canada and offers tenant and landlord representation, project and development services, investment sales, advisory and appraisal services, debt capital markets and integrated facilities management services to owners and tenants.

Statoil Fuel & Retail sells its Schweigaardsgate 16 property in Oslo
13 February 2013 – Statoil Fuel & Retail, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc. (Couche-Tard), sells its property at Schweigaardsgate 16, Oslo, Norway, together with the company’s planned European headquarters, to Entra Eiendom AS. Responsibility for building the headquarters is transferred to Entra Eiendom as part of the agreement. Statoil Fuel & Retail signs a long-term lease of the premises.
“We are pleased with the agreement,” says Sonja Horn, project owner, Statoil Fuel & Retail. “Entra Eiendom is a solid, professional real estate developer who will add value both to the project and the local community. We look forward to moving into a modern, environmentally-friendly and flexible building, tailored to our needs.”
Statoil Fuel & Retail’s strategy is to create value through real estate asset management. It is not strategically important for the company to own its planned European headquarters and the sale releases capital to be reinvested in the company’s core business.
Statoil Fuel & Retail was acquired by Canadian company Couche-Tard before the summer of 2012. The company’s European headquarters will continue to be in Oslo and the new office building at Schweigaardsgate 16 will be shared with the company’s Norwegian business unit.
The project to build the planned eight-storey building has the ambition to achieve “excellent” status according to the BREEAM classification system. To maintain the best possible sunlight conditions for Teaterplassen, the neighbouring square, some of the originally-designed volume has been redistributed, making the building appear to step down towards the square. The quality of the square will be improved when the building is finished. It will become about 25 percent larger than it is today and a new passage through the building will connect Teaterplassen with the adjacent Stasjonsalmenningen.
Statoil Fuel & Retail has received the required building and demolition permits from the Norwegian Planning and Building Services (Plan- og bygningsetaten). Demolition of the existing building on the property begins this week. The company plans to move into its new headquarters in the first half of 2015.
Statoil Fuel & Retail sells its Schweigaardsgate 16 property in Oslo

New Year's Eve party à la Times Square in Montreal
Thu, 2009-09-10 17:37.
Shuyee Lee
Montreal is getting its own Times Square-style Rockin' New Year's Eve.
Media company Astral Media is organizing a big New Year's Eve party this year on McGill College Avenue downtown. It'll be an annual affair complete with live music and comedy, activities, as well as sound and light performances.
The Big Astral Countdown for Mira event will help raise money for the Mira Foundation, which provides over 180 guide dogs and assistance to people with mental, visual, hearing and motor disabilities.
Astral Media owns CJAD 800 which will broadcast the event live, along with its sister stations CHOM 97.7 and Virgin Radio 96.
http://www.cjad.com/node/990235

Feb. 26 (Bloomberg) -- New York’s biggest banks and securities firms may relinquish 8 million square feet of office space this year, deepening the worst commercial property slump in more than a decade as they abandon a record amount of property.
JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., bankrupt Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and industry rivals have vacated 4.6 million feet, a figure that may climb by another 4 million as businesses leave or sublet space they no longer need, according CB Richard Ellis Group Inc., the largest commercial property broker.
Banks, brokers and insurers have fired more than 177,000 employees in the Americas as the recession and credit crisis battered balance sheets. Financial services firms occupy about a quarter of Manhattan’s 362 million square feet of office space and account for almost 40 percent now available for sublease, CB Richard Ellis data show.
“Entire segments of the industry are gone,” said Marisa Di Natale, a senior economist at Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania. “We’re talking about the end of 2012 before things actually start to turn up again for the New York office market.”
The amount of available space may reach 15.6 percent by the end of the year, the most since 1996, according to Los Angeles- based CB Richard Ellis. Vacancies are already the highest since 2004 and rents are down 5 percent, the biggest drop in at least two decades.
In 2003, the city had 14.8 million square feet available for sublease. If financial firms give up as much as CB Richard Ellis expects, that record will be broken.
‘Wild Card’
CB Richard Ellis’s figures don’t include any space Bank of America may relinquish at the World Financial Center in lower Manhattan, where Merrill Lynch & Co., the securities firm it acquired last month, occupies 2.8 million square feet. Brookfield Properties Inc., the second-biggest owner of U.S. office buildings by square footage, owns the Financial Center.
Merrill “is a wild card right now,” said Robert Stella, principal at Boston-based real estate brokerage CresaPartners.
Manhattan’s availability rate -- vacancies plus occupied space that is on the market -- was 12.3 percent at the end of January, up more than 50 percent compared with a year earlier and almost 9 percent from December, according to CB Richard Ellis.
Commercial real estate prices dropped almost 15 percent last year, more than U.S. house prices, Moody’s Investors Service said in a Feb. 19 report. The decline returned values to 2005 levels, according to the Moody’s/REAL Commercial Property Price Indexes.
SL Green
The Bloomberg Office REIT Index fell 25 percent since the start of January, with SL Green Realty, the biggest owner of Manhattan skyscrapers, slumping 50 percent. Vornado Realty Trust, whose buildings include One and Two Penn Plaza in Midtown, has fallen 36 percent.
SL Green of New York gets 41 percent of its revenue from financial firms, including 13 percent from Citigroup, according to its Web site.
Bank of America plans to give up 530,000 square feet at 9 West 57th St. as it completes a move to 1 Bryant Park. New York- based Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is leaving 1.3 million square feet of offices at 1 New York Plaza and 77 Water St. as it prepares to move to new headquarters near the World Trade Center site.
JPMorgan put 320,000 square feet of Park Avenue offices on the market after scooping up rival Bear Stearns Cos. last year along with the company’s 45-story headquarters tower at 383 Madison Ave.
Citigroup has put 11 floors, or 326,000 square feet, on the market at the 59-story Citigroup Center at Lexington Avenue and 53rd Street, bank spokesman Jon Diat said in an e-mail. The tower is owned by Mortimer Zuckerman’s Boston Properties Inc.
Moving Out
“We’ve been having conversations for two and a half years with Citigroup, and it’s been very clear to us that for the right economic transaction, they would move out of virtually any space in midtown Manhattan that they have,” Boston Properties President Douglas Linde said on a conference call last month.
Boston Properties is also expecting to receive about 490,000 square feet back from Lehman Brothers at 399 Park Ave. as part of the bank’s liquidation.
That space “will be a monumental challenge” to fill, said Michael Knott, senior analyst at Newport Beach, California-based Green Street Advisors. “They’re going to have to really bend over backwards on rate, or make the strategic decision to sit on it for an extended period of time.”
Zuckerman said in an interview he doesn’t expect the increase in sublets to be a long-term problem for landlords.
“You’re not going to be able to get for the space what you were able to get a year ago,” he said. “But in a year or two, in my judgment, the space will be absorbed.”
Future Forecast
Landlords must be prepared for a slow recovery, said Di Natale of Moody’s Economy.com. Commercial vacancy rates climbed for almost a year and a half after the last recession ended in late 2001.
Still, CB Richard Ellis Tri-State Chairman Robert Alexander said New York’s financial community will regenerate.
“In the late ‘80s, we lost Drexel Burnham Lambert and we lost Salomon Brothers, and we lost Thomson McKinnon,” Alexander said. “New York City survived.”

Condos, costs squeeze Vancouver office space
DAVID EBNER
From Monday's Globe and Mail
June 29, 2008 at 10:33 PM EDT
VANCOUVER — The numbers, at first glance, couldn't look better for a commercial real estate developer.
On the small peninsula that constitutes downtown Vancouver, there's barely any available office space. The 2.6-per-cent vacancy rate ranks as the lowest of any city core in North America. And rents are soaring, with the cost of prime office space jumping 25 per cent in just one year to more than $34 per square foot.
Yet hardly any new commercial space is being built. Just 130,000 square feet is under construction in downtown Vancouver, which would add less than 1 per cent to what exists. It's a fraction of what's happening elsewhere: Calgary's downtown is expanding by 5.6 million square feet, or 17 per cent, and Toronto is growing by 3.8 million square feet, or 5 per cent.
Construction costs have risen far faster than rents, driven by a Western Canadian construction boom that has made labour scarce and expensive, and the climbing cost of materials such as steel.
Vancouver developers say they just can't make the numbers add up for new projects. In Calgary, for example, the energy boom allows developers to charge $45 a square foot, a third more than they can get in the Vancouver market.
“It takes a lot of nerve to build today,” said Don Vassos, a senior vice-president at real estate services firm CB Richard Ellis Ltd. who opened the company's Vancouver office 24 years ago.
Since then, the downtown has gone through a transformation that helped produce the current shortage of commercial space. It's a trend the city now hopes to reverse.
In the 1980s and 1990s, planners and politicians set about creating the Vancouver that currently exists, one consistently on best-places-to-live lists. Under the rubric of “living first,” the city heavily promoted residential development downtown, pushing the population on the peninsula to 90,000, more than double the 40,000 or so in the mid-1980s.
But the dozens of residential condominiums have begun to squeeze the commercial core. Four years ago, alarm bells started going off for planners when Duke Energy sold the landmark Westcoast Transmission building for a condo conversion. That provoked the city to impose a temporary halt on such changes in the central business district.
With developers predicting that Vancouver will run out of space to build new commercial buildings in the next 20 years, city council is poised to encourage construction of more office space. In July, it will consider a series of proposals from planners that include an expanded central business district, tighter rules on condo conversions and proposals to allow taller towers with more density.
Until things change, however, businesses will continue to feel the squeeze.
Part of the problem, developers say, is that condos are far more profitable than commercial space because residential buyers are willing to pay large premiums for benefits such as views of the ocean and mountains.
And unlike Calgary and Toronto, where large corporations drive demand for many storeys of commercial space, the typical Vancouver tenant is more likely to be a law firm or upstart technology company requiring far less space. Developers have to sign on many more tenants to make a project work instead of landing one big name.
Some Vancouver developers say the city has to take measures to encourage new commercial buildings that go beyond the proposals city planners have put together.
“They need to address costs,” said Tony Astles, executive vice-president for B.C. at Bentall Real Estate. “And they need to address the length of time it takes to go through the whole process, from zoning to approvals.
“It's a clogged-up system. Right now, it's very difficult to rationalize a high-rise office tower in downtown Vancouver. The costs of construction have risen so fast that rents – even though they're at their all-time high – haven't kept up.”
http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080629.wrdowntown30/BNStory/Business/home

Ahead: A brighter horizon for Cabot Square
Plans due; Downtown area in search of an identity
Source: The Gazette
Cty councillor Karim Boulos is standing in the Canadian Centre for Architecture, airing his optimism over a scale model of what is known as "the Cabot Square area" - a part of the Peter McGill district he represents.
But the Cabot Square area is also a stretch of Ste. Catherine St. that makes many Montrealers wince.
The thoroughfare between Lambert Closse and Chomedey Sts. has been this city's version of a picture of Dorian Gray, a pastiche of boarded-up storefronts, crumbling facades and grafitti that seems to have spread while other neighbourhoods renewed themselves.
However, by this time next Monday, Boulos and the rest of the city will get a bigger glimpse of what might happen to the piece of downtown that's been in search of an identity for nearly a generation. That's when three teams of architects and urban planners will submit their versions of what should be done to revive the Cabot Square area.
Boulos, Ville Marie borough mayor Benoit Labonté and members of an alliance of neighbourhood businesses and residents met the press yesterday to detail the attempts to revitalize the neighbourhood.
The planning teams were formed after a collection of 25 business, property owners and residents' associations started the Table de concertation du centre-ville ouest.
"The properties may be empty but the owners are still paying taxes," Boulos said. "They haven't left, they're waiting to see what's going to happen."
The plans submitted by the teams will be judged by a jury that includes architect and Harvard professor Joan Busquest, Dinu Bumbaru of Heritage Montreal and founding director Phyllis Lambert of the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
The successful submission will form the basis for an urban plan that will produced by the borough and submitted to public consultations.
Boulos suggests that if everything goes well, changes in the district might begin "by this fall."
And for Lambert, whose architectural centre sprawls across the neighbourhood's southern edge, change is what's needed for a district that spent decades losing more than it's gained.
"Over the last years, this area has deteriorated miserably," she said. "There used to be the Forum and all those stores where the Faubourg (Ste. Catherine) is. ... But it just goes down the drain further and further.
"Then there's the block ... just to the east of the Forum with the (Seville) theatre on it, which has been boarded up for years.
"And this just destroys the whole area. People have no respect (for the neighbourhood), and why would you? People just walk down the street and it's so miserable."
Lambert's nephew, Stephen Bronfman, is chairman of Claridge Inc., an investment company that owns the Seville Theatre block.
Asked in October about the condition of the block, Lambert told The Gazette: "It is coming along. Slowly, but we are working closely with the city and other landlords in the area. It takes time to do properly."
Labonté says a development project for the Seville block is under study by the borough's urban committee. Boulos has said in earlier interviews that a private investor plans to turn the block into student residences.
"What I can tell you about this project," Labonté said, "is that that there will be lots of room for students - especially for Concordia University - and the design of the building will be quite impressive. ... I'm pretty confident this project at the Seville Theatre will start the renewal of this leg of Ste. Catherine St."
A decision by the borough on which development plan will be used is expected in May. But final approval will rest with the city's executive committee.
In the meantime, Montrealers and the people who own the storefronts that make them wince wait to see what's going to happen.

Square Dealing: Changes could be afoot at the iconic Westmount Square
BY EVA FRIEDE, MONTREAL GAZETTE OCTOBER 10, 2014 2:16 PM
Investor Olivier Leclerc outside Westmount Square, who has purchased 84 units in the complex for $70 million.
Photograph by: John Mahoney , Montreal Gazette
An investor has bought 84 rental units at Westmount Square for $70 million, and says that less than two months after the sale, he has already resold at least 48 of the apartments.
Olivier Leclerc, 26, acting with real estate broker and adviser Albert Sayegh, bought the units at the iconic Mies van der Rohe buildings in August from Elad Canada, a division of the Israeli real estate multinational Tshuva Group.
The deal means that Elad has sold all of the approximately 220 units in the two residential towers of Westmount Square. Now it is proposing to convert Tower 1, with 200,000 square feet of office space, to condos.
But Westmount has slapped a freeze on all conversions from commercial or institutional buildings to residential use and is studying all development in its southeast commercial sector, from Atwater to Greene Avenues. The freeze is in effect until an interim bylaw is adopted and an update on the study is expected in November, said Westmount councillor Theodora Samiotis.
Samiotis, who is the commissioner of urban planning for Westmount, said there are two concerns about such a conversion. First is Westmount Square’s heritage value as a Mies van der Rohe mixed commercial-residential project, completed in 1967. “On a heritage value, obviously we would want to make sure that any architectural aspect of the design would respect that,” she said.
And there are those who would argue that changing the usage combination would change the architect’s vision, she said. The complex was conceived with three towers — two residential and one office — and an 86,000-square-foot shopping concourse.
Equally important to Samiotis is the commercial vibrancy of the area. “So when you tell me you are changing a commercial tower to a residential tower, I am concerned about the impact this is going to have on my commercial district,” she said.
Residential tax rates are lower than commercial rates, so the city also could lose revenue.
“It’s not just the conversion of any building. It’s a landmark,” she said.
They are very much aware of the proposal to convert the office tower, Sayegh said, but the file is currently closed.
“If Tower 1 does occur, we will look at it,” he said.
Elad Canada owns, operates or is developing such properties as New York’s Plaza Hotel, Emerald City in Toronto and in Montreal, the Cité Nature development near the Olympic Village and Le Nordelac in Point St-Charles. The 84 Westmount Square units were the remaining rental units in two of the towers.
In a meeting at Sayegh’s real estate office — he is president of the commercial division of RE/MAX Du Cartier on Bernard St. W. — Leclerc said he bought the apartments in August as an investment, and resold them to various groups of investors, two of which bought about 12 apartments each. Leclerc would not specify how many of the apartments he intends to keep.
It is a significant sale, probably the biggest of the year, said Patrice Ménard of Patrice Ménard Multi-Logement, which specializes in sales of multi-unit residential buildings. But it is not a record. By comparison, the La Cité complex of three buildings with more than 1,300 units sold for $172 million two years ago. Also in 2012, Elad sold the Olympic Village to Capreit Real Estate Investment Trust for about $176 million, Ménard said. Both La Cité and the Olympic Village remain rental properties, however.
Both Sayegh and Leclerc emphasized that confidence in the economy was a basis for the Westmount Square purchase. The reselling was not a flip, but a long-term strategy, Sayegh said. “He has his own chess game,” Sayegh said.
“The context was favourable to take hold of such a prestigious building — the political context,” Leclerc said.
“The socio-economic climate in Quebec has never been as conducive to investments as it is today,” Sayegh added.
Leclerc would not say what profit he has taken so far, nor what return he is expecting.
“It’s a nice acquisition to my portfolio,” Leclerc said. He also owns or has converted buildings in Mont St-Hilaire and Brossard as well as Hampstead Court on Queen Mary, bought in 2011 and now all sold.
Four years ago, Leclerc joined his father, Ghislain, in the business of converting rental buildings to co-operatives. Over 25 years, he and his father have converted more than 2,500 apartments, he said. His father is now semi-retired.
With his father, he also worked on the conversion of the Gleneagles apartments on Côte des Neiges Rd., bought in 2010 and sold by 2013.
“We do major work. We put the building in top shape,” Leclerc said. “Then we make esthetic improvements. After that, we sell the apartments.
“We never throw out the tenants. We profit from the fact that the tenants are in place, who pay rent ‘x’ for an apartment in the state it is in.
“We respect the rental laws.”
Leclerc said he buys only good buildings in good locations. “The area reflects the tenants. Location, location, location.”
At Westmount Square, the tenants are not affected, Leclerc said, as the same company, Cogir, manages the building.
The range of price for the 84 apartments was $400,000 to $2 million.
[email protected]
Twitter: @evitastyle

Some of the measures in the Snøhetta concept sound familiar...
http://nymag.com/arts/architecture/features/times-square-2012-4/
Could it become a place where New Yorkers actually want to hang out?
By Justin Davidson Published Apr 15, 2012
Snøhetta's plan for Times Square: a low-key, pedestrian-friendly base for the riot of lights above.
(Photo: Rendering courtesy of MIR)
For two decades, New Yorkers have viewed Times Square as the city’s heart of brightness, a candy-colored hellhole to be avoided whenever possible. At either end of a workday or just before curtain time, we may dart and jostle past slow-moving out-of-towners, but the notion of meeting friends for dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe or whiling away a weekend afternoon held rapt by the symphony of screens doesn’t cross our minds.
Starting next fall, workers with jackhammers will tear apart the bow tie, temporarily making it an even less congenial place to hang out. But one major goal of the $45 million construction project is to persuade New Yorkers to love Times Square—to convince them that it’s not just a backdrop for a million daily snapshots but Manhattan’s most central, and most convivial, gathering spot. Architects and visionaries have often addressed that old ambition with high-energy concepts that gave us the current high-tech razzmatazz. Even in this round of ideas, the city has fended off proposals for colored LEDs embedded in the pavement, for ramps, staircases, pavilions, digital information kiosks, heat lamps, trees, lawns, canopies, and, of course, more video screens.
Instead, the city hired the architectural firm Snøhetta to produce a quiet, even minimal design that doesn’t try vainly to compete with the glowing canyons. Its beauty lies in dark, heavy sobriety and a desire to be a lasting pedestal to the frenzied dazzle above. In the most straightforward sense, the new plan enshrines a transformation that has already taken place. Ever since vehicles were banned from Broadway between 42nd and 47th Streets, in 2009, Times Square has felt like a temporary art installation. Pedestrians have been able to step off the curb and into the weirdly motor-free street. Rickety red café tables, which replaced plastic beach chairs, dot a blue river painted on the asphalt. Streetlights, lampposts, mailboxes, hydrants, and pay phones remain clustered along the Broadway sidewalk, staying clear of nonexistent traffic.
The new construction will eliminate that feeling of making do. Curbs will vanish. Pedestrian areas will be leveled and clad in tweedy concrete tiles that run lengthwise down Broadway and the Seventh Avenue sidewalks, meeting in an angled confluence of patterns. Nickel-size steel discs set into the pavement will catch the light and toss it back into the brilliant air. Instead of perching on metal chairs, loiterers will be able to sit, lean, sprawl, jump, and stand on ten massive black granite benches up to 50 feet long and five feet wide. Electrical and fiber-optic-cable outlets will be packed into the benches so that, for outdoor performances, special-event crews will no longer need to haul in noisy, diesel-burning generators or drape the square in cables and duct tape. Even on ordinary days, the square will be de-*cluttered of the traffic signs, bollards, cones, and boxes that cause foot traffic to seize up. With any luck, crowds will gather and mingle only in the center plain between the benches, leaving free-flowing channels on either side for the rest of us, who have somewhere to be, people!
Originally based in Norway and now firmly ensconced in New York, Snøhetta in 2008 created one of the most successful public spaces in recent memory: the pedestrian pathway that winds its way around, inside, in front of, and on top of the firm’s new opera house in Oslo. It’s a cosmopolitan yet utterly local place, an exquisite juncture of sea, sky, and glacier-like building, which seems to be slipping calmly into the fjord. It suggests that the architects understand the interaction of local culture and public space. “We’re not trying to make an instant photograph of happiness,” says the firm’s co-founder Craig Dykers, explaining that Times Square needs a little grit. “There’s been quite a lot done to make the city feel more delicate, which is good, but we shouldn’t forget its industrial history. At Times Square, there were rivets on the old marquees, the steelwork on the signs was industrial, and the lighting was naked bulbs. We want that whole history to be reflected in the experience of the space.”
That may be a lot to ask of benches and pavers. Toys ’R’ Us isn’t slinking back to the suburbs, and all the happy, shiny logos won’t be dimming anytime soon. But Times Square has always reinvented itself every decade or two, and it may be shifting again. It’s been the epicenter of the media world, but Condé Nast will soon be moving to the World Trade Center, and Google has settled in Chelsea. In the nineties, Times Square lured law firms and financial outfits with the city’s freshest, most technologically advanced office towers, but new models inexorably supersede the old, and this time they’ll be in lower Manhattan and Hudson Yards. This is not to say that the glitter is flaking off, only that the least likely option for the future is stasis, so Snøhetta had to design a permanent platform for the unpredictable.
There are two distinct approaches to public-space renovations: the grand design and the perpetual tweak. If Snøhetta is pursuing the first path, the apostle of the second is Daniel Biederman, who led the fabulously successful renovation of Bryant Park in the early nineties and has been managing it ever since, filling it with activities, temporary structures, and retro details. “If I were the czar of Times Square design, I would do the traditional stuff: plants, kiosks, movable seating, games, programming—small touches,” Biederman says. “Most people look down as far as two feet from the ground and up to fourteen feet off the ground, so at Times Square they have a chance to waste a ton of money on a surface that nobody’s going to see.” Yet Bryant Park’s charms don’t constitute a recipe. Times Square is not a graciously bounded piazza, and it shouldn’t be a verdant oasis. It’s an accidental wedge formed by two major avenues. Seventh Avenue will keep its traffic, and so will the cross streets. Even below ground, ancient water mains, electrical lines, telephone cables, subway tunnels, and long-buried trolley tracks tangle chaotically. The square’s getting a face-lift and major surgery at the same time. Quaintness has no place here.
Every bit of this area acts as a showcase of some kind. The new design is to the street what the M&M’s store is to candy and Good Morning America is to television: an urban launchpad for a global commodity. In this case, the product is the philosophy of public space preached by the Bloomberg administration’s impassioned transportation commissioner, Janette *Sadik-Khan. For decades, American cities have treated their streets as traffic conduits meant to speed cars along as efficiently as possible (which is often not very efficiently at all). Instead, the new thinking goes, they should be a flexible network equally comfortable for drivers and dawdlers, parents with strollers, cyclists, truckers, and anyone who would rather just sit for a while and rest. Until 2009, the theater district embodied the disjunction between the way streets were conceived and the way they were used, as Sadik-Khan points out with data-driven fervor.
“Times Square had 137 percent more accidents and crashes than any other avenue in the area,” she says of the way she found it when she took office in 2007. “It was a hot spot of congestion. You had 356,000 people coming through on foot every day and less than 10 percent of the space allocated to pedestrians. It wasn’t working, and it was a problem that had been lying in plain sight for 200 years.” You remember: Crowds spilled over the curbs into the street, gridlock stranded taxis in the triangular crossroads, and hurried theatergoers battled through the stationary herds.
The Times Square Alliance, which represents local businesses, suggested an incremental solution: Widen the sidewalks a little bit. Sadik-Khan one-upped them and completely closed five blocks of Broadway to traffic. The result was a harvest of happy data: fewer accidents, cleaner air, more satisfied survey respondents, and popular events like the Summer Solstice free yoga classes that last year attracted 6,000 people. (The 2012 edition takes place on June 20.) Clearing out cars also brought a surprising economic roar. Before, annual commercial rents in the area averaged about $800 per square foot. Last week, the eyewear emporium Oakley opened a new store, paying about $1,400 per square foot.
Everyone in the Bloomberg administration is watching the countdown to the end of the mayor’s term, and Sadik-Khan’s Department of Transportation seems to be rushing to set her revolution in concrete so that her successor can’t merely paint it over. Times Square is only the most visible representative of a program that spans all five boroughs: Another 50 permanent plaza renovations are completed or in the works, from Madison Square to Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn and Roberto Clemente Plaza in the Bronx. Uncharacteristically for a city agency, the DOT is resisting uniformity, trying to gear each project to local desires, so the Snøhetta design won’t be an archetype, but it will be a much-*scrutinized example.
Tourists already make the crossroads of the world an obligatory visit, but Tim Tompkins, the president of the Times Square Alliance, wants to change both the composition of the crowds and the reasons they come. “Ten years from now, we want people to want to see what public art is happening here,” he says. There is of course the possibility that a rejuvenated Times Square will appeal to New Yorkers so intensely that it will once again become as unbearably crowded as it was before. That’s a risk the city is willing to take.